Page 463 - The Toyota Way Fieldbook

Chapter 20. Leading the Change 433

Stuck in the Middle
Pressure from the top, from the bottom, from all sides. Welcome to the life of the
middle manager. We’re using the term “middle manager” broadly to include
everyone from the first line supervisor to the department heads. Their jobs are
to turn the great ideas of the people at the top into concrete action and results.
This means they must affect the lives of people at the bottom and work through
these people. They must deliver daily production, be accountable for quality
and service, and deal with all the “experts” management sends along to “help”
them do their jobs better.
To people in the middle, lean is one in a long line of great ideas from man-
agement coming to them by way of staff. Middle management has another
peculiar characteristic. Despite the formal power of people at the top of the
organization, middle managers have the power to either get things done or
stonewall. They can be the difference between the success or failure of lean. To
a change agent, the middle managers can be less than pleasant. This is not
because they are naturally stubborn, resistant folks. It’s because of their posi-
tion. The buck stops with them.
For a lean change agent, the middle management level poses the most serious
challenges. On the one hand, this level provides the most leverage for lean trans-
formation. It is nice to have the support of an executive sponsor, but they’re not
going to drive the real action. The middle manager will. In fact, we saw that the
group leaders at Toyota drive most of improvement at the operating level. On
the other hand, it’s unrealistic to expect many middle managers to come for-
ward and become the leaders of the lean change process in their areas. The team
leaders do a lot of that at Toyota, but only after years of mentoring and coach-
ing and creating a particular culture. And it is based on the Toyota system of
group and team leaders discussed in Chapter 10.
There are some exceptions. There are particular individuals in different
parts of middle management—engineering, quality, and manufacturing—who
naturally relate to lean and get excited about it. If they grab it and take off, they
can begin to win support upward even if senior management is not initially
behind them. Unfortunately, these cases are rare. It must start at the top.
So in most cases lean transformation will rely more heavily on the lean
coach using the hierarchy and power of the executive sponsor and working
through middle management. Over time, if the company is successful in devel-
oping a true lean culture, there will be a flip-flop and the lean coach will be
there to support middle management in driving the change.

Finding the “Sociometric Stars” at the Bottom
Organizations are “networks” in social science terms. Individuals are connected to
other individuals through communication ties, social ties, and emotional ties. If